Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended by ABC on Wednesday following a brief pressure campaign from the Trump administration as well as conservatives in the media, who successfully twisted Kimmel’s words following last week’s assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
During Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday, the comedian criticized conservatives for trying to “score political points” off Kirk’s death.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his monologue on Monday.
Kimmel’s slightly ambiguous comments came after conservatives spent the weekend blaming the left and transgender people for Kirk’s killing. At the time, the public knew little about the alleged shooter’s motives. Prosecutors disclosed on Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, told his trans roommate and apparent romantic partner, “I had enough of his hatred.”
Amid the right’s sprawling effort to get people fired from their jobs for weighing in on the Kirk assassination, conservatives decided, with certainty, that Kimmel had accused a right-winger of murdering Kirk — and demanded his firing over it. While there’s some room for disagreement about what Kimmel meant or was trying to say, he did not actually say on ABC that the alleged killer was a MAGA member, as the right would have you believe.
An article on the Fox News website Tuesday evening said that Kimmel had “insinuated Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin was a member of the ‘MAGA gang.’” Fox News contributor Joe Concha asserted matter-of-factly: “Jimmy Kimmel’s argument is that the guy with the trans boyfriend took down, gunned down the biggest supporter and advocate of President Trump because he’s MAGA.”
Fox News host Will Cain claimed Wednesday that Kimmel was attempting “to make the assassin MAGA.” Brian Kilmeade, the Fox host who recently suggested the government should “just kill” homeless people, got in on the act too, claiming that “Jimmy Kimmel came out and said, ‘These MAGA guys wanted to pretend that this guy wasn’t one of them.’”
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The Daily Wire, for its part, wrote that Kimmel “claimed the suspected assassin of Charlie Kirk was part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement,” while The Blaze said: “Jimmy Kimmel claims Charlie Kirk shooter is ‘MAGA’ during wildly unfunny monologue.”
Again, none of this is a fair or accurate description of what Kimmel said.
Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, Trumpworld’s favorite one-time plagiarist, amped up the volume, posting Wednesday morning on X that “Jimmy Kimmel went on air and told the ABC audience that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a MAGA conservative, effectively blaming Charlie Kirk for his own assassination.”
Johnson called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke ABC’s broadcast license “immediately.”
He made similar comments on his podcast later Wednesday about how Kimmel had said “it’s actually the right that killed Charlie Kirk,” adding that the comedian was “saying that Charlie Kirk deserved it.”
In reality, Kimmel has condemned Kirk’s “senseless murder” and anyone who was “cheering” it. He wrote last week on Instagram, “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents, and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
Johnson called Kimmel’s comments on ABC a “clear-cut violation” of the FCC’s policy on “news distortion … punishable by the revocation of the offending broadcast license.” And then he brought on Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, to make this threat explicit.
Johnson teed up the discussion by suggesting to Carr that Kimmel “seems to be inviting” potential “copycats” and “further radicalization” in the wake of Kirk’s murder.
Carr responded that “when you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible. As you’ve indicated, there are avenues here for the FCC.”
The FCC chairman, himself, then claimed that Kimmel was attempting to push the narrative that Kirk’s shooter “was somehow a MAGA or Republican-motivated person,” again calling it “sick.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Carr said, “I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr added. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC and major broadcasters Nexstar and Sinclair had succumbed to the Trump administration’s threats, knocking Kimmel off the air — at least for now.
To underscore how soaked in bad faith this whole enterprise was, as Rolling Stone reported on Wednesday night, multiple ABC and Disney execs knew that Kimmel hadn’t said anything over the line, and had not actually said what those on the MAGA right had accused him of saying.
“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation says on Thursday. “It was so cowardly.”
Trump, who has long wanted to use the might of the federal government to punish liberal late-night comedians, has heralded the Kimmel news while contributing his own inaccuracies to the discourse.
“The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” he wrote Wednesday. On Thursday morning, the president claimed that “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else.” (At this point, Kimmel has not been fired.)
Trump added Thursday that Kimmel had “said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.”
That didn’t happen, either — but given the ultra-noisy and successful MAGA outrage campaign against Kimmel, who would know?
From Rolling Stone US
